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Bad Sectors

I have a new (less than 6 months) 80G Maxtor ATA 133 hard drive. During a recent freeze up and reboot I got the error that scandisk (98se) detected possible bad sectors on the drive and a thorough scandisk should be done. The thorough scandisk detected a bad cluster, marked it and attempted without success to move the data. I was under the assumption and had it confirmed by several tech republic people, as well as the vendor I bought the drive from, that when bad sectors started showing up thatthe drive was unreliable and should be replaced. I took the drive back to the store and was told that he wiped the drive, did another scandisk and the bad sector was not found. He now wants to give me back the same drive and says if it happens againhe will have it replaced. I would like to know if it is possible that this drive is really ok or am I just setting myself up for a replacement and another OS reinstall in the near future.

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Bad Sectors

It is possible that they wiped the drive with a drive utility or they may have done a low level format,once you start have bad sectors problems your drive becomes unreliable in that this portion of the drive cannot be used and I have not expierenceda drive sector being repaired only moved to the end of the drive,how long before the warrenty runs out,donot put off the inevitable if you do not feel good about the drive get a new one now.

Bad Sectors

Bad Sectors

I have seen bad sectors show up in the first few months of using a drive, and never saw another in 5 years on the same setup.

I would pass it off as "infant" mortality.In the "old" days, you had to manually enter a list of known bad clusters everytime you formated the hard drive so that the OS would ignore those clusters.

As much as they would like you to believe it, the drive mfg is not able to use 100% of the disk surface. There are always a few clusters and sectors that don't meet performance specs. These are marked as bad in the partition table.

To provide peace of mind about the drive, download the drive monitor and diagnostic utilities from Maxtor's web site.

Bad Sectors

Bad Sectors

If they reformated the drive, then bad sectors will automatically be marked and not used by the OS. It is normal that a certain percentage of a drive has bad space, in fact almost all do, coming from the mfg. Formating will mark those sectors. The vendor may have never even tried to check the drive with a disk scan/repair utility, knowing that formating it would solve the current problem. You might want to check the total space on the drive (used and unused) and see if it is wiht-in tolerance of the warrenty. If it shows much less space than what it should have, then you have the option to get a replacement. Bad sectors will show up once in a while, and it even used to be that just a good bump against the machine could cause the "needle" to touch the surface of the disk and scratch it, causing that space to be defect. But most now a days are much more durable.

One good sign of a Disk on it's way out, when it continuously gets bad sectors - I wouldn't tolerate this happening weekly or even monthly. In the past couple of years I have had minimal of problems with this (only one or two incidents on several Hard Drives, and these were probably due to mishandling)

Bad Sectors

Bad Sectors

My two cents - maybe it's worth that much - is to balance the cost of losing more data against the cost of a new drive. I agree with the earlier answers that the drive *probably* will be OK. I personally would not use it for "mission critical" applications involving thousands of dollars worth of data when a new one cost only a hundred bucks or so. If that ain't the case, hang in there with it...

Bad Sectors

Bad Sectors

Thanks for the responses guys. I decided to take the drive back and do another scandisk before going on with the reinstall and see what happened. Early in the scan I was notified that I have new areas of the drive about to fail so now it will be going back for replacement. Should have followed my instincts and insisted on a replacement the last time and saved myself a trip.

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